This blog runs parallel to a new poetry blog 'Poetry Pinfold' (poetrypinfold.blogspot.com), and a new blog with poems in Dutch (bartnooteboomgedichten.blogspot.com)

Sunday, November 17, 2013

120. Does reading literature make people
better?

In item 5
of this blog, on free will, I argued that we do not have full free will, we do
not have full conscious control over unconscious impulses, but we do have some
conscious influence. We can consciously simulate the effects and outcomes of
possible actions. While this may not determine the choice of action it may
affect it. When we consider how bad smoking is for our health, this may not
keep us from smoking, but it may still affect the impulse to do so.

In item 92
I argued that reading fiction helps to develop empathy and the ability to
simulate the consequences of acts. Fiction is about possible worlds,
and the reader must suspend disbelief.

The Belgian
philosopher Patricia de Martelaere argued against this view. She claimed that
it is a ruse to maintain the old, failing philosophical view of meaning in
terms of reference to things in the world. She claims that the very term
fiction is misguided. The claim of the reference view is that with our
words in language we can access ‘reality’; that literature is not about this
reality and hence must be ‘fictive’.

De
Martelaere claims, correctly, that we cannot claim to ‘represent reality
realistically’. We use language not to mirror reality but to form
it conceptually. Presumed ‘reality’ is already fictive. In literature we simply
go a step further, adding ‘more of ourselves’, in deliberate imagination.

While I
agree with this, I still think that it is useful to think of literature as
being about possible worlds rather than what we see as reality. It makes a difference whether we violate reality
because we cannot do otherwise, in language and thought, or do so deliberately,
in phantasy.

De
Martelaere claims, correctly in my view, that in reading fiction we do not take
more distance from protagonists but less. In real life we have good reasons not
to identify with others. We might suffer from it in various ways. Our
identification may not be reciprocated. We may have to follow it up with
sacrifices. We look away from miserable people lying crumpled on the sidewalk,
from personal tragedies we encounter, and from global hardship and terror
displayed on TV. We identify more easily with Madame Bovary, or with Othello.

I still
think that reading fiction (I maintain that term, notwithstanding de
Martelaere’s criticism) entails a suspension of disbelief , but, and
here I agree with her, that it also entails a suspension of distance,
and leap of identification, at no cost or risk.

Because of
that we can experiment, intellectually and morally, with emotions, motives and
actions, at no cost and risk, using literature as an exercise in simulation and
empathy.

Does the development
of empathy make people better? There is warm and cold empathy. Warm empathy is accompanied
with feelings of compassion, remorse, and shame, arising in the amygdala, deep
in the brain. Cold empathy is a purely intellectual, dispassionate insight in
how people think and feel, in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, in a disconnect
with the amygdala.

It is a feature
of psychopaths, and of other people who remain calm and lucid under danger,
violence, risk or what to other people would be stress. Think of surgeons, heroes,
and investment bankers. Empathy is for better or for worse.

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